The chair of the US House of Representatives science committee questioned the trustworthiness of the journal Science during a hearing this week, Huffington Post reports.
"That is not known as an objective writer or magazine," Representative Lamar Smith (R-Tx.) said during a hearing yesterday.
The hearing was centered on climate change, of which Smith is a skeptic, and Smith's remark came after Pennsylvania State University climate researcher Michael Mann alluded to a piece appearing in Science that criticized Smith's use of the House committee as a "tool to advance his political agenda rather than a forum to examine important issues facing the US research community." Mann had been asked how he would guide the committee in the future.
Snopes adds that Smith's comment elicited an audible response from people in the gallery. Science, it notes, has been published continuously since 1883 and has consistently been one of the top-ranked scientific journals in the world.
A Science spokesperson tells the Huffington Post that its news section "strives to be neutral and objective" and that the research papers it publishes undergo "a rigorous, multi-step, peer-review process."